Sunday, July 31, 2005

This past month proved to be an expensive one. My credit card bill was up to $1000, and I had to write David a $1000 check to even out all of the purchases we picked up for each other. But looking back, a good portion of the credit card came as rent from my dorm (valuing at $609), David covered a good portion of the security deposit when we first signed the lease, and we recently got a nice TV, so overall, if I just look at the other costs, it's not too bad. Plus, I'm going to get about $400+ back from the OSU housing department for the time I wasn't living in the dorms.

David and I had noticed that there was a frisbee golf course nearby, so while we were looking around at Dicks Sporting Goods, we decided to pick up some frisbees designed for frisbee golf. It came as you see in the picture in a set of 3. The orange one is the "fairway driver" of the periscopes designed for that first throw off the Frisbee tee. The white one is sort of a utility frisbee designed for intermediate distances and such, and the red one is the "putter" frisbee designed for you to throw into the basket at short distances. Shortly after getting the frisbees, David and I went out to the course that was nearby, but after playing two holes and starting the third, divides Icelandic strength got the best of him as he flung one of his periscopes high up into a nearby group of trees and shrubs, and we weren't able to find the Frisbee after an exhaustive search :( Despite that, I think we'll be back at the park next weekend to see if we can go through the whole course.

On Saturday night I went to see Fantastic Four, which has been trashed by the movie critics, but regular movie viewers seemed to be more tolerant of it. My take on it is that you just sit back and enjoy it as a popcorn movie and don't expect too much. Yeah, FF tries to be funny way too much at times, but it's not so bad that you'll walk out of the theater. However, I was sort of confused about the powers Jessica Alba had. In addition to being invisible, she's able to somehow contort and control some sort of force field, which I have no idea how it relates to her invisiblity powers. Anyone have any clue to this?

David had always been a proponent of getting a grill for our apartment, so this past weekend, we went to Walmart and got this guy. We tried it out on some hamburgers and hot dogs, and it does a smokin good job of cooking the meats. The only thing we found sort of defective was the fact that the drip catcher can near the bottom of the grill didn't really catch the grease that cooked off the meats; it would just drip past the can onto the ground. Anyways, here's a shopper's beware story for the day. When we were looking for hamburger meats to cook on the grill, we looked at the frozen food section at Walmart and found a 20 pack of quarter pounder patties for around $11 or so. Sitting right next to those was another 20 pack of quarter pounders, but they cost $5.70, which befuddled David and I at first, and we were just about to get those burgers (being the poor college graduate students we are :P) when we looked at the nutritional information, and we discovered that the cheap burgers were basically 40% fat! So needless to say, we didn't get those burgers and went with the $11 pack instead. The classic moral of the story: If it's too cheap to be true, there's probably a catch to it :P

Last note: I heard Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" way too many times on the radio this weekend while driving around (like around 5 or 6 times). I guess people have gone bananas over it...

Thursday, July 28, 2005

While David and I were playing around with it yesterday, we noticed that the TV is smart enough in some cases to examine what type of input is going into it, and it will adjust the screen size accordingly. For example, if we're watching a letterbox DVD movie, it'll adjust the screen so that it'll minimize the black space running above and below the movie picture. All in all, we're pretty happy with the purchase :)

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

At least that's what my fortune cookie said today as my friends and I ate at our daily Asian lunch place. Well, although it wasn't really news, David and I did pick up our shiny new TV today :) I was quite impressed by how prompt the Sears service people are. David and I showed up at the pickup place where there was a machine to scan your receipt for the time you pick up. David's name shows up on a monitor above the scanner, and there is actually a counter timing how long it takes for the Sears people to get our TV out. I looked at the other names that already had their items picked out, and the times averaged between 1 min 30 seconds to around 3 minutes. I didn't know the exact time the Sears guy came out since I had gone out to move my van closer to the pickup entrance, but once I had moved the van and gotten out of the car (which probably took 2 minutes at most), David and the Sears guy were already coming out the door with our new TV! One more thing to note...there was a dry-erase board next to the scanner which wrote that last month, 95% of all customers were serviced in 5 minutes or less, and 100% of all customers yesterday had been served in 5 minutes or less. So needless to say, I was quite surprised and impressed.

Of course, when there's good news, there's always some sort of bad news to follow :( The hard drive in my desktop computer decided to go belly up for the 2nd time, and an attempt to reinstall Windows proved to be useless as Windows was stuck at trying to find the drive so I can reformat it :( Well, luckily the warranty is still valid (up till December of 2006), so I'm gonna RMA it and hope for a shiny new hard drive later in the future. But in the meantime....no GW :(

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Monday, July 25, 2005

My forehead and nose have started to peel today from being out in the sun too long on Friday (golfing) and Saturday (biking). Any homebrew remedies that anyone can suggest to help my skin recover faster? :(

Sunday, July 24, 2005

After talking, researching, and shopping around, David and I have finally settled on a new TV for our apartment. With the help of a friend of ours who had worked in the Sears electronics department, we managed to snag a Toshiba 30 inch widescreen TV for around $650. We don't know whether we'll upgrade our cable to receive HDTV programming, but we can't wait till Wednesday when the TV will come in ^_^

Saturday, July 23, 2005

This morning, I went to play some golf at a nearby golf course with David's friend Kevin. Needless to say, since it had been probably 3 weeks or so since I hit a ball, I was pretty much hacking through the 18 holes, which was frustrating at times even though I really shouldn't expect myself to be a great golfer. I ended up shooting 69 and 68 respectively....for the first 9 and second 9 holes :-p However, Kevin was quite a bit better than me as he averaged about a double bogey per hole, and he had the shot of the day on the par 3 17th hole. As I watched about 50 or so yards away, , Kevin hit a high chip shot up from the rough to the left of the green, and I slowly watched it as it hit the green and trickled into the hole. It was his only birdie of the day, but I think he'll take it!

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

I don't know if this is the best place to talk about it, but I'm going to anyways. Back in high school, I would talk with many of my friends through their breakups with their girlfriends, but I couldn't understand at the time why it would be so hard to let go. Flash to today, and I can fully understand what they went through when I was dating Addie. Right now my mind and my heart are still sort of battling it out to see who is right, with my mind reminding me of all the negative things that have happened, but with my heart telling me to recall all those good moments I had with Addie, it's been dragging me down emotionally the past 2 weeks or so. She didn't want to date me anymore since I wasn't "romantic" enough, but being 360+ miles apart didn't help the situation much either despite my best efforts. She's apparently dating some guy she found on online dating who is "awesome", so I really shouldn't have anything to put hope on, but I'm still emotionally conflicted.

Sigh...sometimes I wish I wasn't such a nice guy, always getting screwed over without any apprecation. Sorry for the rant...

Sunday, July 17, 2005

This past weekend, David and I took a trip to Dayton, OH since some of his friends were anticipating the release of the 6th Harry Potter book, and they were going to Barnes and Noble to wait till midnight on Saturday to pick up the books, and then they were going to spend a good part of Saturday reading through the 6th book. Although I had only read the first Harry Potter book last summer, I figured that since I hadn't picked up a good book to read for leisure in a while, I would tag along and start on book 2 when most of them would start on book 6. Anyways, I took some pictures leading up to the sale at Barnes and Noble.

Too bad we probably needed to bring one of these to shrink people and push them out of the way, but the scene wasn't as chaotic as the pictures might have portrayed. The store manager called people whose reservation numbers ranged from 1 through 50 to get the books first, and since we had numbers 45-47, we were in the first group to receive the books. About 20 minutes or so after the books were released, my friends and I made it out of B&N without too much trouble.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

When this arrives on your desktop :P After some cohersion from Velius, I've decided to jump on the Guild Wars bandwagon. Hopefully it'll turn out to be fun like FF without the daily grind. I found it sort of amusing and funny how much extra detail was taken to make sure you cannot just buy the game, burn it, and return it back as shown by the following.

Saturday, July 9, 2005

You know when you wake up feeling woozy, walk to the bathroom and the sight of the toilet makes you want to hurl, you know that something's wrong with your stomach. I was pretty much bed ridden for most of the day since my stomach wasn't feeling to happy for whatever reason. Thinking back and doing some investigation, I blame the milk since I checked the milk I brought over from my dorm to discover it had an expiration date of July 4th, and I realized that my stomach started to complain after I ate some cereal with milk yesterday morning.

Later this evening, I felt good enough to go and check out the gym available to use at the Q. Since I've been neglecting my biking routine, and the fact that I'm a bit far away from campus to access the normal biking route I usually take, I decided to hop onto one of the biking machines and crank out the miles from there. I only managed to get about 5.2 miles in 15 minutes, but I set the workout on "hill" mode, which basically made the pedaling progressively harder as time went on. I also did some weights with my arms and using the inclined situp thingie.

In sort of an interesting experiment this afternoon, I was able to give Kabitzin a virtual tour of my apartment using my laptop, my webcam, and my wireless router via AIM. So for those who want a virtual tour, feel free to send me a msg or email :P

Man, what a tiring day. I woke up at 5:44 am this morning, and after several hours of packing and moving back and forth between my dorm and my new apartment, David and I managed to get all of our stuff into the new apartment by 10 pm! Right now it's 2:05 am on Friday morning, so I'm probably going to konk out at any time. Thank goodness the new apartment room is on the first floor; otherwise, I think I probably would have died of heat exhaustion from all that moving. Pics to come soon of the new cove!

Thursday, July 7, 2005

Of all the times I wake up at 5:44 am in the morning, the last thing I would have predicted to see on TV was a terrorist attack in London. I hope that the people and leaders of the UK decide to take action now about the terrorists after backing off on their efforts before. Also, I hope the G8 conference leaders come up with some sort of collective plan to deal with the terrorists as well.

Wednesday, July 6, 2005

I just got back to Ohio again today with a minivan filled with the following.

1. Sofa2. Bed3. Dresser4. Night Stand5. 2 Bar Chairs

Yeah it took some ingenuity, but I somehow managed to get all of the above in there. I would take a pic of it, but my rechargeable batteries had died on me over the weekend.

In the meantime, it's time for lone me to figure out how to pack everything in my old cove into boxes since tomorrow is moving day into the Q. So far, the box count is up to 13 and rising :( Anyone want to come over to Columbus and help me out?